Jill Cunniff
City Beach
2007, The Militia Group/Vinyl Films
Here in the steamy state of Texas, August is fucking brutal. It’s my least favorite month. When you’re a kid, late summer is the melancholy time when school is about to start. When you’re an adult, late summer is the time when you and everyone you know has already gone away and come back from their big summer vacation plans. Nobody’s looking forward to anything. Everyone is just kind of existing and that’s it. There’s no such thing as a “beautiful day” this time of year. The grass and trees are all bleached by the sun. We’re mostly all about the end of the heat wave, that first taste of autumn. It should be here in about a month or so IF we’re lucky.
(Important note: In Texas, summer often keeps kicking the shit out of us into October. I once road-tripped through rural Missouri in mid-September and was awestruck by how the whole landscape was already covered in beautiful autumn yellows and oranges. Where I come from–only about six hundred miles south–a sight like that is still a month off).
The only nice thing about late summer is that I think Jill Cunniff captured it perfectly and made it lovely on her first (and hopefully not her last) solo album.
Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #5: JILL CUNNIFF, City Beach”